Bookmarking this post for the next time someone tries to argue that black humor is never funny.

Let's do this another way:

Saying "English is agglutinative" is not the same thing as saying "English is first and foremost an agglutinative language" or "English is primarily categorized as agglutinative." It is roughly the equivalent of saying "English has [some] instances of agglutination." That was my intention at the time and it's clear that I was arguing for agglutination re: suffix attachment and not the exotic stuff, and so... by admitting that English contains valid instances of agglutination, you've completely agreed with me on every primary topic in this little tangent and pointedly ignored the rest (epicness being widely used and found in modern dictionaries, coinage of new words such as assassination, the split infinitives you refuse to discuss, etc.)

So, I'm calling this a win. Get back to me with something interesting or intelligent if you want; otherwise, I do believe I'm done here.

Sources are given for the entire section, all print but I'd seen some stuff on Google as well. Sorry, I'm not going to spoon feed it to you. If you have an ounce of intellectual honesty you will spend 30 seconds and reply to it on your own.

You ignored the very next sentence, where I implicitly acknowledged that the Pascal example (as an analogy) was a flawed one and I gave you a much better one involving C++, Java, VBA and CLOS. Ignoring my Lisp fetish for the moment, do you agree or disagree that Visual Basic (non-.NET) is object oriented and if you agree, what is the minimum subset of features you define for OO? I would argue that despite a very superficial implementation of a few C++-ish paradigms that in practice VBA isn't as OO as C is with structs and typedefs. So, is VBA OO or isn't it? Is C++? Is C?

Do you in fact care about the nuts and bolts at all or do you simply care about whether the marketing droids proclaim it to be an object oriented language on the cover of the latest "for dummies" book? Clarify this, and you clarify your own confusion over the agglutination bit.

It is certainly possible to roll one's own OO in Pascal or a number of other languages, to one degree or another. Or for a somewhat better metaphor, it's possible to talk about VBA's extremely anemic OO without implying that it can be placed in the same category of C++'s OO. And then a Lisper like me will chime in and say that without CLOS-type generic functions and considering all of those artificial barriers around what you can do with primitives, C++ really isn't very object oriented, either. Honestly, seriously, that ghetto "design pattern" OO dogshit that C++/Java has foisted on countless innocent minds has way more in common with C structs than it does with the majesty that is CLOS.

But that doesn't mean I get to wig out and demand that no one ever use the term 'object oriented' with C++ or VBA. In other words, OO is a non-atomic quality that can be possessed to greater or lesser degrees. While it is often valid and useful to talk in terms of discrete classifications of languages in terms of being OO or non-OO, it is also valid refer to the general principle when discussing specific cases--doing foo in language X is OO. Or, that language X is OO to the extent that people tend to do foo in it. VBA is nowhere near the ultra-OO side of the universe and English is nowhere near the ultra-agglutinative side of the universe, but neither case is a warrant for some kind of all-out war against simple, contextual descriptions.

Or, again, you know, YOU COULD GO LOOK AT THE FUCKING LINKS SHOWING THAT OTHER PEOPLE, THAT OTHER *LINGUISTS* HAVE USED THE TERM IN THE SAME GENERALIZED WAY AS I HAVE. Christ almighty, it's like arguing with someone who thinks that the word "conservative" can't ever be used unless referring to someone in Britain's Conservative party.

Moving goalposts? You've again switched the argument away from "epicness" to semantics, in reply a post that specifically refuted your claim that the word was something I made up (refuted) and was not found in dictionaries (also refuted). You're now going back to the claim that agglutinative has only one definition, which I have already refuted.

Your continued refusal to accept that a word might have another definition (which has also been used in the field of linguistics, specifically) is, of course, another fine and amusingly self-satirical example your own linguistic ignorance.

Of course there are languages that employ on the fly grammatical agglutination and I never said that English was one of them, but it is certainly agglutinative insofar as we have some commonly understood prefixes and suffixes that are routinely used to coin new words, generally without comment except from the cranky, ultraconservative peanut gallery.

Or, to put it another way: I have sources backing up everything I've said. You have nothing but your crotchety old man rants and your own highly mobile goal posts, which I've caught and demolished in spite of your disingenuous babble.

Google result for epicness: "About 987,000 results"

From its Wiktionary entry: "The quality or state of being epic."

The split infinitive argument really has the potential to be much more fun, though, so I'd prefer you address that one. There's really no possible way to be against them without falling back on some very silly authoritarian and/or Romantic ideas.

The wikipedia article on agglutination had a sourced subsection of significant size (which I wasn't aware of when this started, nor would it make sense to argue otherwise because I had no reason to think you would embark on this newspeak semantic sideshow) which specifically, explicitly supports what I am talking about.

Epicness is obviously not "my own" coinage. It's been around for a while now. Given how cumbersome and Romantically portentious alternative constructions like "epic nature" would be, and given how easily understandable the -ness suffix is, I would say that far outweighs your own crotchety "but I don't liiiike it!" complaint.

You bring up dictionaries--again, English has no central authority. Dictionaries copy what people do, not the other way around. (This is of course why "muggle" is in the OED.) Given that there are countless examples of similar coinage (again: "assassination") you haven't explained what feature of English does or should prevent it. I assert that the only obstacles are self-important Latinophiles who prefer verbose constructions of atomic words, along with the centralized binding authorities that many Romantic languages seem to have.

Finally, you never clarified your position on split infinitives. Your reply to that post implies you're against them, in which case I would ask why you would want English to deliberately sacrifice its precision and flexibility by forcing us to emulate Romantic infinitives.

And you've spent like what, 5 comments in a row or something busy ignoring the original argument and focusing on playing semantic games instead because you know you are wrong. (Assuming you are the same person as the AC.)

I think that a core concept of linguistics is that words can have more than one meaning and that people who try to insist otherwise are douchebags. Exhibit 1: Noam Chomsky.

I'm using the original definition of the word, a definition that is still in common (if not the most common) use.

Again, you are arguing for a specific technical definition of a term while ignoring the obvious general definition I was using to make my point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... You admitted English was inflective and fusional, ergo it is also agglutinative (in the general sense of the term) to the extent that "epicness" is perfectly recognizable and valid. You want to argue with that, you might as well attack the word "assassination", a word invented by Shakespeare from the root word "assassin".

For all the intellectual honesty you're showing, you might as well start an argument with a chef that eggplant is a good dessert food, and then when they try to argue babble on about how eggplant is a botanical fruit. It isn't relevant to the original discussion, and furthermore non-botanists (/non-linguists) do not give a shit.

If you want to argue Germanic languages aren't agglutinative you are of course free to do so... with a linguist, in some jargon-heavy journal somewhere. Have fun. I'm not particularly interested in trotting down that particular pedantic path regarding degree or type of word-gluing that is considered "agglutinative" or not. A quick check confirms that the word agglutinative (which of course originally simply meant "to glue", or something along those lines) does indeed has multiple definitions--it's the broader definition that I was referring to, and this was obviously made clear in the context of the criticism of the word "epicness".

Trying to hijack the argument by using an alternate definition of the word that clearly wasn't intended (in light of my defense against your original half-baked criticism) is lame.

You wanna know the best part? I didn't even do that intentionally. Although to be fair, 'to tie unambigulously' wouldn't have been ambiguous. You may consult Google for some examples of situations where the non-split version is obviously and unfixably ambiguous.

Well not all of this was from university, but at some point I learned that English doesn't have a standardizing body--only handfuls of hypercorrective self-hating Latinophiles who occasionally pop up and try to deem perfectly logical and useful constructions 'incorrect'. I learned that English is closely related to a number of agglutinative languages, it's painfully obvious that quite a few of our words have been created via agglutination, I learned that the language spoken by Shakespeare was NOT "old English" but merely an earlier form of Modern English, and I also learned that Shakespeare invented a number of new words through agglutination that are still in widespread use today. By contrast, it is also quite obvious that Romantic languages have done a lot to resist new word formation via agglutination, which is one of the reasons (but not the only one) why you will so often see French or Spanish translations that have phrases 4-5 words long as the equivalent of 1-2 words in English.

People who don't believe that need explained to them why split infinitives are a good thing are either thoroughly-indoctrinated authoritarians parroting someone else's silly ideas or they are irredeemable Latinophiles completely unwilling to accept a different verb paradigm. Split infinitives are perfectly natural, logical, have very long history of use and in some sentences are the only way to unambiguously tie an adverb down. I determined this on my own through experimentation long before hearing it confirmed by someone with a doctorate in English. But again, the doctorates do not really matter--they have no binding authority. We therefore have only the history of the language and rationality to guide us, neither of which support your obviously Latin-derived arguments.

Myths perpetrated by shameless Latinophiles. Let me guess: you're also one of those assholes who thinks split infinitives are incorrect?

I have my degree. English is agglutinative. Get over it.